1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to coding methods and apparatuses, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for concatenated channel coding with variable code rate and coding gain in a data communication system.
2. Description of Related Art
As described in the commonly assigned and incorporated U.S. Pat. No. 6,016,311, a wireless communication system facilitates two-way communication between a plurality of subscriber radio stations or subscriber units (fixed and portable) and a fixed network infrastructure. Exemplary communication systems include mobile cellular telephone systems, personal communication systems (PCS), and cordless telephones. The key objective of these wireless communication systems is to provide communication channels on demand between the plurality of subscriber units and their respective base stations in order to connect a subscriber unit user with the fixed network infrastructure (usually a wire-line system). In the wireless systems having multiple access schemes a time “frame” is used as the basic information transmission unit. Each frame is sub-divided into a plurality of time slots. Some time slots are used for control purposes and some for information transfer. Subscriber units typically communicate with a selected base station using a “duplexing” scheme thus allowing for the exchange of information in both directions of connection.
Transmissions from the base station to the subscriber unit are commonly referred to as “downlink” transmissions. Transmissions from the subscriber unit to the base station are commonly referred to as “uplink” transmissions. Depending upon the design criteria of a given system, the prior art wireless communication systems have typically used either time division duplexing (TDD) or frequency division duplexing (FDD) methods to facilitate the exchange of information between the base station and the subscriber units. Both the TDD and FDD duplexing schemes are well known in the art.
Recently, wideband or “broadband” wireless communications networks have been proposed for delivery of enhanced broadband services such as voice, data and video. The broadband wireless communication system facilitates two-way communication between a plurality of base stations and a plurality of fixed subscriber stations or Customer Premises Equipment (CPE). One exemplary broadband wireless communication system is described in the co-pending application Ser. No. 08/974,376 and is shown in the block diagram of FIG. 1. As shown in FIG. 1, an exemplary broadband wireless communication system 100 includes a plurality of cells 102. Each cell 102 contains an associated cell site 104 that primarily includes a base station 106 and an active antenna array 108. Each cell 102 provides wireless connectivity between the cell's base station 106 and a plurality of customer premises equipment (CPE) 110 positioned at fixed customer sites 112 throughout the coverage area of the cell 102. The users of the system 100 may include both residential and business customers. Consequently, the users of the system have different and varying usage and bandwidth requirement needs. Each cell may service several hundred or more residential and business CPEs.
The broadband wireless communication system 100 of FIG. 1 provides true “bandwidth-on-demand” to the plurality of CPEs 110. CPEs 110 request bandwidth allocations from their respective base stations 106 based upon the type and quality of services requested by the customers served by the CPEs. Different broadband services have different bandwidth and latency requirements. The type and quality of services available to the customers are variable and selectable. The base station media access control (“MAC”) allocates available bandwidth on a physical channel on the uplink and the downlink. Within the uplink and downlink sub-frames, the base station MAC allocates the available bandwidth between the various services depending upon the priorities and rules imposed by their quality of service (“QoS”). The MAC transports data between a MAC “layer” (information higher layers such as TCP/IP) and a “physical layer” (information on the physical channel).
Due to several well known communication phenomenon occurring in the transmission link between the base stations 106 and the CPEs 112, it is well known that the transmission links or channels may be noisy and thereby produce errors during transmission. These errors are typically measured as Bit Error Rates (BERs) that are produced during data transmission. Depending upon the severity of these errors, communication between the base stations 106 and the CPEs 112 can be detrimentally affected. As is well known, by properly encoding data, errors introduced by noisy channels can be reduced to any desired level without sacrificing the rate of information transmission or storage. Since Shannon first demonstrated this concept in his landmark 1948 paper entitled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, by C. E. Shannon, published in the Bell System Technical Journal, pps. 379-423 (Part I), 623-656 (Part II), in Jul. 1948, a great deal of effort has been put forth on devising efficient coding and encoding methods for error control in a noisy communication environment. Consequently, use of error correcting coding schemes has become an integral part in the design of modern communication systems.
For example, in order to compensate for the detrimental effects produced by noisy communication channels (or for noise that may be generated at both the sources and destinations), the data exchanged between the base stations 106 and the CPEs 112 of the system 100 of FIG. 1 may be coded using conventional combined coding and modulation designs. For example, convolutional or trellis-coded modulation (TCM)-Reed-Solomon (RS) type coders are well known in the art and can be used to code the data as it is exchanged in the system 100 of FIG. 6. Convolutional or TCM-RS concatenation coding schemes are well known in the communication art as exemplified by their description in the text entitled “Convolutional Coding, Fundamentals and Applications”, by L. H. Charles Lee, published by Artech House, Inc. in 1997, the entire text of which is hereby fully incorporated by reference for its teachings on convolutional/TCM-RS coding schemes and techniques. As is well known, in the past, channel coding designs and modulation designs were treated as separate entities. Hamming distance was considered an appropriate measure for system design. TCM design offers the optimum matching between the channel encoder output code vector and the modulator using a special signal mapping technique.
As is well known, the coding gains produced by coding schemes employing convolutional or TCM-coding schemes for the inner codes and RS for the outer codes (i.e., concatenating the convolutional/TCM inner codes with the RS outer codes) is relatively high in terms of the minimum Hamming distance and coding rates achieved. Disadvantageously, the high coding gains achieved by these conventional schemes come at a price in terms of complexity, cost, size, speed, data transmission delays and power.
As is well known to those of skill in the art, one of the main disadvantages associated with the prior art concatenated coding schemes is that these techniques require the use of symbol “interleavers”. The Convolutional/TCM-RS concatenation techniques must employ a symbol interleaver between the outer and inner codes because when the inner code decoder makes a decoding error, it usually produces a long burst of errors that affect multiple consecutive symbols of the outer decoder. Thus without a deinterleaver, the performance of the outer decoder severely degrades and the effective coding gains produced by the concatenation is lost. Furthermore, the presence of interleaver/deinterleaver distributes the error bursts over multiple outer code words thereby effectively utilizing the power of the outer codes. In communication systems that transmit only short or variable length packets, a symbol interleaver cannot be utilized because it is impractical. In addition, the symbol interleaver required by the prior art concatenated channel coding schemes increase delays in data transmission.
These increased transmission delays may be unacceptable in some applications. For example, when the system 100 of FIG. 1 is used to communicate T1-type continuous data services between the base stations and the CPEs. These type of data services often have well-controlled delivery latency requirements that may not tolerate the transmission delays introduced by the symbol interleavers utilized by the concatenated channel coding schemes of the prior art.
A second disadvantage associated with the prior art concatenated coding schemes is that these techniques require additional overhead for trellis termination at the end of packets. This additional overhead lessens the effective coding gains obtained via concatenation. A third disadvantage associated with the prior art concatenated coding schemes is the use of Viterbi decoders for constraint length 7 codes. As is well known to those of skill in the art, constraint length 7 Viterbi decoders cause significant decoding delays that are undesirable for packet data transmissions. Furthermore, these decoders are relatively complex and therefore must be implemented using devices having increased cost and power characteristics.
The prior art concatenated channel coding schemes are relatively complex to implement and therefore suffer the power, size, and reliability disadvantages as compared with less complex implementations. As a result, prior art channel coding implementations for packet data transmission systems have typically used “single level” coding techniques such as convolutional, TCM or block coding techniques. Examples of block codes are Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes, Reed-Muller (RM) codes, cyclic codes, array codes, single-error-correcting (SEC) Hamming codes, and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. Therefore, disadvantageously, packet transmission systems, have not heretofore been able to take advantage of the benefits offered by conventional concatenation coding techniques that provide the advantage of soft-decision decoding of the inner code resulting in larger coding gain and better coding efficiencies.
Therefore, a need exists for a concatenated channel coding method and apparatus that can be easily implemented, provides acceptable coding performance, is well suited for use in small or variable size packet data transmission systems, and overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art concatenated channel coding methods and apparatuses. Specifically, a need exists for a concatenated channel coding method and apparatus that requires no additional overhead caused by trellis termination and reduces implementation complexity and decoding delays. Furthermore, a need exists for a concatenated channel coding method and apparatus for packet data transmission that allows for varying coding gain. The present invention provides such a concatenated coding method and apparatus.